/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7030845
Subguns go back to 1918. The Uzi is remarkable for a number of reasons:
>space and length efficient, the bolt telescopes around the barrel, and the pistolgrip is your magazine well, it's much shorter than most other subguns of the time, which are much longer for comparable or even less barrel length
>well balanced, the bolt travelling back and forth disrupts your accuracy less than on other subguns of its era, it's easier to shoot
>good magazine, using a two position feed and with durable feed lips, compare to the Sten and MP40 which have flimsy and delicate magazines that are less reliable and easy to load
>really easy to take care of, drop the magazine, lift off the top cover, lift out the bolt, then unscrew the barrel nut to slide out the barrel, everything is easily accessible to diagnose and clean, and it's trivial to put back together
>inexpensive, the body is made from sheet steel stampings, it features reinforcing ribs to increase structural strength for the given gauge of metal, it's a simple open-bolt blowback gun with a fixed firing pin
>safe, it has a grip safety to make sure the bolt will not move unless you're holding it (the bolt slipping off the sear if bumped or dropped being a genuine risk of many other open-bolt guns), the gun would eventually also have a safety ratchet added to its charging handle, so if your hand slipped while manipulating it, it stops in place, instead of being let loose and possibly chambering and firing a cartridge

I think it's brilliant for its era, it's pretty much the culmination of all subgun development from around the world up until that point, taking all the best lessons from before. It would eventually be surpassed by designs like the H&K MP5 and later the Steyr TMP, but working on the premise of an open-bolt blowback gun with a stamped body, you really can't make a better design, you'd need to move to a more complex action and other materials.

It also looks really cool, hence why I'm putting it in Doom.

>>5363054
A grip safety.
The Uzi is a very old fashioned and simple kind of subgun from the 1950's, largely based in design on guns from years priors, only with at the time, a modern perspective.

How the Uzi works, and how a lot of subguns back then worked, was that the bolt itself was basically just a solid piece, a weight really, and rather than having a separate striker or hammer mechanism, the firing-pin is machined straight into the bolt as a permanent, solid protrusion.
How it operates is that you pull the bolt back, and then it locks, being held in place with the trigger, when you pull it, the bolt is let go and the spring shoves it flying, where it grabs a cartridge from the magazine, puts it in the chamber, and the inertia transfers straight through the firing-pin and fires the cartridge immediately. The bolt recoils, and is then either caught by the trigger mechanism (if you let the trigger go), or it bounces against the spring and shoots again (if you hold the trigger down).

This is a very easy, very cheap, and very foolproof way to make a pistol caliber machinegun, there is pretty much just the one moving part; the bolt. You can build this in a garage.
One of the backsides however is that this isn't a 100% secure way of making a gun, as if you say, smack someone in the back of the head with the stock, or if you drop it down a flight of stairs, an impact can jolt the trigger mechanism so the bolt is released, meaning it picks up a cartridge and fires it, potentially for multiple rounds, sometimes even the entire magazine.
Since this can be seriously dangerous, by the 1940's and 1950's, guns like these would start to be designed with a safety mechanism of a sort, generally it was something like on the Uzi, where the bolt wouldn't be able to move unless a spring-loaded grip-safety was held down.

With more conventional guns, which fire from a closed-bolt (basically any pistol or rifle you see these days), this isn't really a concern.

>>4570656
Well, gun mechanics are actually rather simple, like if you look at something like an Uzi, there's literally one moving part when it fires, not counting the magazine. It's little more beyond a weight bouncing back and forth on a spring inside a box.

When it comes to lasers and plasma guns and what not, things immediately get radically more complex, you probably need a system with software to make something advanced like plasma happen, much more to launch it. You can't just have a some catches and springs work as a trigger mechanism and call it a day.
It's easy to make things up because it's theoretical technology that we don't have and which actually would be extremely difficult to conceive of.

Like you can tell me all sorts of things about a plasma gun, and as long as it sounds like it sort of makes sense or follows a chain of logic, I can't really call you on it, because we're talking a technology that doesn't actually exist yet.